


Blue

by JoAsakura



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard's favourite colour wasn't always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue

If you had asked John Shepard as a child, what his favourite colour was, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

He would have been able to tell you his least.

Blue. The open blue sky that promised freedom to everyone but him. The pale, oddly stormy stare of his own eyes. But especially the incandescent blue glow of biotics.

It was the ugliest colour imaginable to his child's mind.

Another child at the orphanage had come from the same eezo-blasted chunk of land by the arctic circle, had began to develop the same powers at the same time. But Ilya hadn’t been as good at hiding it, hadn’t bitten his lip till it bled to hold the bad magic back.

Two days after Ilya broke the window, the director sold him to a man and a woman in fine blue suits, neat little gold and black pins on their lapels, and Shepard never saw him again.

Red was preferable. On the streets, choking back the sand, everything was red and nothing hurt and everyone had a little bit of the blue, so what did it matter if he did too?

Except it did, when he’d torn the gang apart, his vision full of lightning and blood, to save an old man’s life.

The Alliance got him to accept the blue. His uniform, the armour that encased him, were comforting, orderly. The blue of earth from space was breathtaking. And they brought his biotics in line, taught him they could be used, and he learned it well.

Still, because of the blue, the other soldiers looked at him askew no matter how well he did (Vanguard. Animal. Living Weapon) until in the red haze of battle he heard them shouting his name on Elysium.

But he didn’t **love** blue, _truly love_ the searing electric blue of biotics until he saw Kaidan use them. Sentinel and Vanguard, they meshed together, control and chaos.

And for a little while, it was beautiful.

And after everything, as they march through the ruddy sands of mars, despite the misgivings and accusations, he takes comfort in the man wearing blue armour behind him. Like them both, it’s scarred and battered, but the blue isn’t just a paint job to pretty up the surface. It goes down to the core, it goes down to their cores.

And as they tear through the Cerberus soldiers, control and chaos, it’s beautiful.


End file.
